Glass

Glass is an esoteric, physical phenomenon in the Switchboard that manifests in the form of a brilliant, crystalline, translucent solid, both taking and holding a jagged edge, while scattering light that passes through it, giving it the appearance of a splendidly-cut gemstone. Originating from its birthplace - the Vitric Shelf, which in turn arose by rather unusual means - very little about its workings are truly understood, other than the manner in which it interacts with all things calcic.

Glass’ most noteworthy property is that chalk cannot abide it; it is caustic to chalk in any and all forms. In utterly inexplicable fashion, any chalk that comes in contact with glass, should the conditions be right, is systematically frayed and torn at the very seams, shredded as though by microscopic hands within and without, unwinding and unravelling in a manner wholly dissimilar to how these are understood, only to re-stitch the chalk that falls prey to it into an entirely novel form; still calcic, but skewed in a manner that differs holistically from what it once was, adopting a new manner that grates at the senses and the world around it.

In a sense, glass perfects. It takes all forms of chalkweave and sees to it that they are seized up in both arms, and elegantly ferried to state that approximates their final shape. In this process, whatever that weave once was is ‘destroyed’, in that there is a discrepancy in its ontology with regards to the contexts of ‘then’ and ‘now’. But glass does not ‘destroy’; we interpret what it does as destruction but it is far from it. glass ascends what is subjected to it, and it is more so a remark upon us than upon glass itself that we find the final result of this ascension work, horrifying.

Origin

All glass that there is originates from the Vitric Shelf, a locale of the Switchboard similar to Isalveh, the Challenger Dark, in that it occupies the fourth spatial dimension, this time being situated opposing the Void; ‘upwards’. Transiting to and from the Vitric Shelf is thus achievable through curvature manipulation, but the sheer distance between the Shelf and the Dancirah - or rather, the prohibitive thickness of the boundary between them - has made it such that transit to the Shelf requires an amount of distortion of space that is simply not doable by even legendarily talented Void-wielders. Travel to the Vitric Shelf is thus more traditionally done via the usage of the jaws, which are elaborated upon further onwards.

The origin of the Vitric Shelf itself however - as it did not exist in earliest Switchboard, similar to the Challenger Dark - is detailed in The Dawn of the Dancirah. During the First Praxis War, the First Thinkers - more specifically, the Eradication Imperative - made use of a ledgerial cast to deceive the Astrolabe into being convinced of the impending annihilation of the Switchboard as a result of chalk itself, causing it to under a Resolution and yield its functional antithesis in the form of Glass. All glass was confined to the Vitric Shelf above the Great Sky, and the Imperative used induced weak-points in the boundary between the Sky and the Shelf to deploy jaws, a poignant feat of curvature manipulation that resulted in rift-like tears in local space, through which glass could be passed through and used to attack anything nearby.

As such, all glass that exists originates from the initial load created when an Astrolabic Resolution birthed the Vitric Shelf, many, many processions into the past, just about around the time the Third Kin arose.

Negentropy

The more technical term for the behavior or properties glass exhibits is negentropy. Chalk - in a sense, emblematic of the chaotic and complex - is attacked and simplified, regularized, indexed and ordered by the influence of glass, dismantling and reforming it as a less entropic iteration upon itself.

This opposition to entropy is immensely problematic to the various calcic phenomena in the Switchboard, as even the mild influence of glass is enough to considerably disrupt various forms of chalkweave, rendering all manners of calcic constructs - from relics to rituals - wholly inoperable and no longer what they once were. Where it gets particularly dire, is that glass is incredibly undiscerning, and even the lattices and straits of thinking weave including - especially - the Third Kin, are immensely vulnerable to this perfecting influence. Ripping through the lattice and straits, tearing them apart and reweaving them into perfected versions of themselves, glass is almost always a slow, painful, inescapable death to the many denizens of the Switchboard.

Glass is thus at war with existence itself. Where the mechanics of the Switchboard are constantly yielding greater and greater complexities in all things, glass opposes this doctrine, striking out and rebuilding the Switchboard in accordance with its own principles. From our perception, glass is a phenomenon that’s malevolent in its doings, though this perception stems entirely from our being entropic beings.

Opposing Glass

Glass is very dimensional in how it exists and acts. Leave chalk near - even in contact with - glass, and odds are good that very little will actually occur. But should enough glass be incident upon a measure of chalkweave, it will begin to act and do so rapidly. Often, the easiest way to do this is by cutting through a given bit of chalkweave, exposing a large cross-section of ribbon to the jagged, perfecting edge. Transformation is swift, though dependent, again, on numerous factors, such as the amount of glass available.

As mentioned above, glass is very undiscerning in how it perfects, attacking weft belonging to a stone and a thinking being much the same way. Much of the difference in the final outcome of glass’ attack on thinking weave, however, such as the Third Kin, is dependent on the fact the Kin have an inbuilt defense mechanism against various phenomenon, which - miraculously, though not by design - includes Glass.

This defense mechanism is their passive reverse unravelling and by extension reverse unravelling techniques. In an instance where the perfecting influence of glass doesn’t outstrip the passive or active reverse unravelling applied to the area of glass’ incidence - outstripping in this case being a match of speed versus speed - it is entirely possible for a Third Kin or other beings in the Switchboard to ‘out-heal’ the encroaching ‘damage’ caused by glass, followed by physically purging the incident glass material from the lattice.

How viable this is a defensive mechanism is of course, a game of numbers. How much glass is in contact with the lattice? How pure is the glass? What part of the lattice is under attack? How fast is the passive/active reverse unravelling? How complex is the subject’s lattice? What truly counts as ‘having defended against Glass’? The last question is a particularly important one, as it is possible to survive glass, but not necessarily, or even often, unscathed. Unfortunate encounters with glass can lead to the stride-dedicom or interface straits being permanently damaged, causing a total inability to stride or weave respectively. Damage to the computational strait hampers cognition and chalkweaving, damage to the memory strait causes memory loss, damage to the interpreter and potential straits cause an overall weakening of the functioning of the lattice. And particularly widespread damage could merely have bought time, having left the straits in a state where they begin a slow, painful decay into non-function.

With all that being said, reverse unravelling remains the sole reason why denizens of the Switchboard can survive an encounter with glass, and are thus almost blessed in this regard. The cultivation of RUteks has been viewed by many - especially particularly noteworthy Striders - as an essential, as glass can always appear anywhere, and those caught unawares will likely meet an early grave.

Prop. Glass’ Alternative Shape

There is something of a hole that exists in the writ of glass, stemming from its origin and how it conflicts with all else that we know about the Switchboard. The nature of this hole is outlined under the Calcodynamics;

The Fundamentals

• All things in the Switchboard are made of chalk.
• All things exist in a pattern-ribbon duality, in which equations can be used to weave ribbon into pattern, and to unweave pattern back into ribbon form.
• Interactions between things in the Switchboard happen at the ribbon level, and so, pattern must partially or fully unravel back into ribbon form for it to interact with other ribbon.

In addition to these rules is a final one;

• The properties of all things (patterns) in the Switchboard are a result of their weave, and ‘properties’ themselves are weave.

From these do we get the beginnings of the Switchboard’s chemistry, the Calcic Chemistry, as it were.

As a note, it must be mentioned that the result of all things being made of weave, the Switchboard bears a marked difference from ours by virtue of the absence of the atom. In the Switchboard, the atom does not exist. There is only chalk.

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The first one is damning enough to the origin of glass, as glass - in the current model of the Switchboard - is not chalk. This rule thus has an exception; that all things in the Switchboard are made of chalk - except for the Vitric Shelf, which is made of glass, which is its very own thing. Not wholly unworkable or even particularly dreadful, but still not the maximally elegant worldbuilding I want from Samsara.

Where the larger issue arises is that the Astrolabic quite literally fabricated Glass. If glass is not made of chalk, what then is it? How is the Astrolabe able to do this? Why can - or rather should its - calcic mechanics be able to realize something wholly uncalcic? Is glass from outside the Switchboard? Does some new caveat need to be added to its mechanics? Exceptions can exist but is this particular one the best or only way to do this?

Behold my proposal; glass is - instead of utterly inexplicable at the fundamental material level - perfected chalkweave.

Perhaps that, as a response to the potential annihilation of the Switchboard, the Astrolabe concocted an equation - or process involving an equation - capable of in turn, producing perfect chalkweave, and this perfected weft took on properties - through praximechanics or as an inherent property of its pattern (inductive weave might be good reading in this regard) - that we now understand as chalkweave. Weft so perfect that it warps all other weft into perfection as well.

This idea has a number of key appeals.

One is just the sheer aesthetic of a final perfection being a form of destruction. I am simply a sucker for that kind of thing. The metaphor of chalk perfection bringing about something akin to annihilation - the strongest chalkweavers working towards an end they both (possibly) cannot achieve, as well as being what would destroy them - is simply immensely satisfying on a thematic front.

The second is more grounded; in the earlier iterations of glass, glass had the ability to transmute chalk into more glass, in a phenomenon known as calciphagy. It was this devouring, transmutation action of glass that made it so particularly deadly, as it could swiftly overrun a lattice in small amounts of time, and - left alone - could gradually takeover much larger amounts of chalk, from small locales and environments, to areas the sizes of neighborhoods, city blocks, whole cities, countries, continents, all the way up to - if not interfered with - an entire planet. This absolutely apocalyptic power in the hands of glass was - as I saw it - absolutely necessary to convey how truly threatening it was.

The third and final - and perhaps appropriately so, as it stretches the limits of what I can mechanically justify - is that glass, ideally, would be uniquely caustic to the lattices and straits of those with the Strider and Weave Protocols. Perhaps by being highly entropic phenomena, or generators of large amounts of entropy within a lattice. Either way, glass would be particularly predatory to Striders and Weavers. Narratively, the main driver of implementing this is to have an in-canon power equalizer between those who can Stride and Weave - the Sil’khan, Fel-Arcad and Vahnkin to a lesser extent - and those who can do neither - the Lancasters. This crack in the otherwise nigh-flawless armor of the gifted in the Switchboard is immensely usable for building narrative.

Glass’ ability to shred and reform lattices, somehow paired with glass’ ability to transmute and propagate, and furthermore coupled with the power to uniquely afflict those outfitted to be the strongest by pure mechanics - perfecting, spreading perfection and deposing the mighty - was my idealized vision for glass and the perfect shape for it to be realized in narrative. When contemplating concepts such as the Shattered, it becomes somewhat more clear to what extents it can be taken.

Glass being chalkweave would also make it subject to calcic principles, making it slightly more explicable how it interacts with the wider Switchboard the way it does. An instantly relevant example of this is the Vitric Ritualism, that makes use of glass in chalk ritualism to more deliberately harness and thus direct its negentropic effects. It would also mean that under certain conditions, glass could be fought by unravelling it, though this would necessarily be a difficult thing to do to preserve the sheer lethality inherent to the concept.

The transmutation/propagation idea inherent to this idea of glass does create some problems in how it is used later, but I imagine most of these problems can be solved via application of the world’s existing mechanics, particularly the already-mentioned Vitric Ritualism, as the various ritualism forms present and practiced in the Switchboard are, at their core, means of working around more troublesome mechanics in place.

As a final note to this, there is a place for proposing that the workings of glass - particularly its quality of propagating more of itself as it simplifies complex lattices - is praximechanical in nature; the ability for glass to spawn more of itself stemming from the praxis-level warfare waged against the concept and thus doctrine of complexity itself. In a sense, complexity exists as a metric on astrolabic ledgers, and this metric can be depleted for glass to spawn as it perfects complex weave.

Unstoppable Perfecting

The clauses that affect how quickly some unlucky weave are unwound down to its perfected state are mainly;

• The amount of incident glass.
• The surface are of the incident glass.
• The nature of the victim lattice, such as if it belongs to thinking weave, or possesses one of the hereditary protocols.

You could thus make the case that glass is uniquely inclined towards perfecting the lattices of more complex things. In older iterations of glass, this simply was a thing that was, with little by way of concrete writ on why it was this way. Even now, it functionally is just something that is, in that it ‘just works’ and accomplishes all of the narrative ambitions that glass is meant to. However, what was proposed by way of an explanation was a sort of ‘vitric momentum’.

The logic of it is that as glass perfects its way through a lattice, scything through weave and stitching it back in accordance with its nature behind it, it builds a sort of ‘momentum’. In some of the negentropic applications of glass, some measures of glass are used in appliances to perform the task of converting heat to motion - something elaborated upon later - and care must be taken to ensure that this glass doesn’t go out of control and start ripping through everything around it. This is called overshooting, where glass escapes the bounds of what it was meant to act upon, and goes viral and rampant. Glass that escapes containment is immensely difficult to stop and contain for this reason.

The more glass chews through, the more momentum it builds, and the more it builds, the more it can chew through, this loop repeating itself until it inevitably exceeds containment parameters and overshoots. In an appliance, you might just lose a toaster oven, but glass that’s incident on a lattice will peel through the top layer and obtain the power needed to shred through even deeper - propagating as it does - and soon overwhelming the lattice.

As such, more complex weave - when ripped through - builds glass’ momentum more than simpler weave, and thus once glass has torn through the top layers of a Kin’s skin, it will have minimal difficulty slicing through the rest of them, until it finally reaches and annihilates the straits.

‘Dilute’ Glass: Scintillate

Later sections of this document tackle the origin of this material phenomena in further detail.

Scintillate describes a stable crystalline chalk-glass complex that exists as a result of the Astrolabic resolutions upon planetary equations following the rise of the Seventh Skydancer, Skydancer Ryjik, the Eater. Creating a stable crystal alloy of chalk and glass artificially is difficult and dangerous and thus it is rather convenient for the Third Kin that scintillate’s chief source is from the somewhat rare crystalline biomes that spawn on the many spheres in the Great Sky. There, it can be mined like virtually any other solid material, graded based on the mass ratio between chalk and glass, and put to various uses.

Its three primary uses are in weaponry, medicine and technology;

• As a weapon, while glass weaponry is decidedly lethal, scintillate weaponry are less so, still imparting their negentropic effects but to a lesser extent. As such they see extensive use as a means of suppression rather than outright extermination, and a well-placed scintillate-tipped round can suppress a target’s ability to weave and even stride momentarily.

• As a medicine, it sees both genuine and recreational uses, elaborated upon further in this document, under ‘Taking the Glass’.

• In technology, scintillate is a much safer way of harnessing glass’ unique negentropic effects, particularly the behavior it exhibits in turning heat back into motion in the Switchboard, which serves as the basis for the functioning of a wide variety of appliances and machinery in a world that has been deprived of the phenomenon of electricity.

A final major benefit of the usage of scintillate is that the presence of chalk in its structure makes it far more responsive to various forms of calcic manipulation, such as through the chalk ritualism.

Glass-Stricken Life

When glass is given free rein in a lattice, what results is an entity known as a Shattered, a being refined into a perverted perfection of what it once was;

The Shattered

Glass is recommended reading before this section.

The glass jaws created by the First Thinker Minds facilitated the deployment of glass nearly anywhere in the Switchboard. Considering the truly destructive effects glass has on the lattices of anything struck by it, it effectively made the glass jaws a superweapon. In actuality, however, the glass jaws are fundamentally a trick of space manipulation; much like one travels ‘downwards’ on the fourth spatial axis to enter the Void, travelling ‘upwards’ allows one to transit to the Vitric Shelf, the birthplace of all glass. Following the Minds’ annihilation, the ramifications of their careless and ceaseless space-tearing were natural, permanent glass jaws that became fixtures of the Starwylds, as well as conditions for the periodic, random, nigh-unpredictable emergence of fresh tears in space where the Vitric Shelf peers through. Truly like a jaw - a gash in space rimmed with kaleidoscopic glass teeth, splitting and reweaving light itself into truer form - unlucky entities and constructs caught in the typical spatial fluctuations that accompany it are swallowed whole and transited to the Vitric Shelf, where they are lacerated into a cruel perfection by vitric negentropy, becoming - as is rumored - one of the unknowable creatures that stalk that plane.

These jaws, however, are not drains into the Vitric Shelf - where what falls in never reemerges again - but rather portals, which allow for things to both go in, and come out. And under the right conditions, something may make a round trip - from the Dancirah, to the Shelf, and back - and have glass perfect their lattice from mundanity to something most closely approximating perfection. Taking on both physiques and logics of glass, they are nigh-alien, categorically destructive, calciphagic, a physicalization of law made evangelical in shape, seemingly engineered by something with an awareness of both the strange and natural; they are the Shattered.

Little is known of the Shattered beyond the mechanics of their formation and the ramifications of their free-reign, as investigating them requires interacting with their vitric anatomies, and is thus a nigh-impossible task. What is concretely known about them, however, is that the glass that has perverted their lattices has done similar to their cognitions, and shattered beasts take on a hue of calciphagy that compels them to target and devour the lattices of thinking weave, particularly the Third Kin, and particularly those who call themselves Striders. This they do to considerable effect, leading many to conclude that the Shattered are the foremost - and perhaps only - true predator of the Third Kin.

Their method of attack is painfully elementary, contrasted by its critical efficacy; the delivery of glass directly into the lattice of calcic subjects. As such, they are defined anatomically by endless glass protrusions and growths - teeth, fangs, claws, bristles, hair, plates, horns, beaks, feathers, hooves - that sees the Shattered resemble mobile pincushions of endless light-splitting daggers, bristling displays of lacerating sharpness and scintillating rainbow. Coupled with a ferocity that has transcended mere animal to become - as some have put it, ‘evangelical’ - they are fascinating phenomena to behold, many who witness them behind screens, from afar, or up close and lived to tell the tale agree that there is a cruel beauty inherent to their existence; that something so alien and majestic would desire to annihilate them in the truest sense of the word.

The ideal way to defeat the Shattered is kinetic trauma. Bearing glass over the majority of their forms, chalk-based attacks are nullified on impact, meaning the vast majority of complex - and thus proportionately powerful - techniques and methodologies are ruled out from the get-go, simply being unwound in their presence. The one weakness of the Shattered is that under their glass armor and weapons is scintillate, and beneath that, the glass-skewed elementary straits that guide their actions. Damage to this locale - much like a shot to the brain - will disable and kill a Shattered with enough regularity to make the end worth pursuing. Where impossible, however, the Shattered bear bodies made of hard crystalline material, and thus physically breaking - shattering, ironically - them like ceramic is another effective means of disabling them. Existing as another page in the historical tome and doctrinal interplay of Sky versus Deep, void-based curvature techniques are immensely effective against the Shattered, with the crushing power of manipulated gravity being a veritable trump card.

Three major categories of Shattered exist. The first we’ve discussed above, being primarily mundane animal creatures of the Dancirah unlucky to be caught in the spatial drag-net of glass jaws, and then being lucky - or unlucky, depending on how you read it - to be returned to the Dancirah after having their lattice and straits scored with glass, pared like fruit, and rewound into a truer iteration of itself. The second category of Shattered are a product of tangentially-similar fates befalling the Third Kin; glass attacking and ripping through their lattices, winding them into perfection. Normally, this kills them outright, the unlucky victim turned to statuesque host for crystalline negentropy. But in some instances, one may resist the perfecting crusade of glass through their lattice, their straits and unraveling reversal pushing back the ablation even as it builds momentum and intrudes even harder. Should glass be pushed out before it can reach a critical momentum and mass to allow for replicative calciphagy, the subject can survive.

Some are lucky in this manner, and thus survive with a few scrapes and the ashen taste of their own mortality coating their tongue, but some are stricken with a fate lying between survival and death, one that is a product of the hurried repair of their lattice under the assault of glass, whereby the straits are split down their lengths and rewound by two opposing masters - entropy and negentropy - the subject having the material of their ontology be diffracted into light-like ribbon like multiply-wound rope, some ends being shorn wickedly, and others wound carelessly back into the fluxing assembly. Matter and principle are torn and healed, torn and healed, until the regenerative process itself begins to restore what might be better dead, and what comes out the other end is a product of truly poor luck. What once was now is No Longer so, and the source material becomes exaggerated into a boisterous perversion; a Shattered Strider.

Shattered Striders Striders who are stricken with glass and encapsulated in an undeath on a knife’s edge between survival and obliteration become Shattered. Glass warps property and principle alike, and the resulting entity is a fractured cognition piloting a molested lattice. Immediately observable - beyond the juts of glass material that circles their anatomy and grows from it like stalagmites - is their becoming a more ‘exaggerated’ version of themselves, glass making the hidden self and the subdued emotion become foremost and dominant. Coupled with this is a rapid acceleration in strength and brutality, paired with a loss in dexterous proficiency, resulting in a morphing of the subject’s original chalkweaving power from a scalpel to a hammer; inelegant but powerful.

Of greatest concern, however, is what glass does to the mind. The warping of principle by glass results in Shattered Striders being guided by instruction emanating from an acceleration of their doctrine to a sort of natural conclusion, where they act maximally true to themselves and their own held ideals before shattering took place. In a sense, doctrines - somewhat ‘held back’ by the realty of the world around their holders - are converted to prime directives - commands to simply do, and leave no room for question. Coupled with the fact Shattered maintain rough impressions of their memories before glass ran them through, the resulting behavior of Shattered Striders is dogmatic protection towards persons, structures, ideals and organizations believed as allied with them, and savage pursuit and destruction of anything viewed as a threat, or even merely contradictory.

Shattering is thus of major concern to various parties in the Switchboard, as a shattering of allies of your side can lead to their provoking engagements with those opposed to you, which might not be winnable or even desirable. Shattered are functionally agents of chaos in the hue of ideological crusaders, taking an espoused ideal and becoming militant with it, wholly incapable of grasping the consequences. So problematic are the Shattered that organizations and bodies such as the Spyndl Academy effectively place bounties on those allied with them that become Shattered, give them a title that makes it clear the fate that has befallen them; the suffix of ‘-No-Longer’ appended to their name, and a trailing moniker of ‘Shattered-’ followed by a word that adequately summarizes their most firmly held principle; and thus inform all who here it who and what they are driven to protect, and destroy.

Because Shattered Striders do not go after their own perceived kin, it is for this very reason that those very kin are tasked with disposing of them. The true tragedy of the shattering is perceived by many as how glass pitches kin against kin, demanding betrayal be done to prevent greater chains of catastrophe.

The Third Order There is, however, a third class of Shattered beings, ones so rare and nigh impossible to investigate that many theorize they simply do not exist, and instead have been confused for the first class of Shattered being. Existing solely in the realm of theory and rumor, some speculate that there are shattered for whom the Vitric Shelf is their birthplace; pure entities that arose from glass in much the same vein as the Third Kin rose from chalk. Writ exists that claims such things have descended from the Shelf before, but all of it remains anecdote, sensational, and generally unreliable. While many entertain the idea, it remains too undefined as a prospect for any kind of hard theorization, with many finding themselves - considering what they’ve observed of the supposedly imperfect Shattered that currently exist - terrified at the very prospect.

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Vitreodynamics

Despite their limited understanding and extensive fear of it, the denizens of the Switchboard have found more than a number of ways to harness glass and its negentropy for their own applications. Ranging from household appliances to breaching computer systems to a medical aid to building impenetrable, inescapable prisons, the endless audacity - and the resourcefulness it fuels - of the denizens of the Switchboard drives them to make use of even the most poignant anathema to their existence.

The DevitNet and Computation

Glass has played a major part in the nuances of communication and computation within the Switchboard, occasionally note even in the form of violent antagonism. The full scale of it being as extensive as it us thus mandates that one reads the full writ themselves, found in Communications and Compute.

That being said, one of the most prolific uses of glass is in the glasswire, an integral invention in the pursuits of some Third Kin who sought to eliminate the distance between minds and the communication gap inherent to that, and thus create a zero-distance cognitive space, where ‘perfect communication’ could be realized in the aim of fulfilling doctrine;

It was made possible via an invention of theirs; a modification of the conduit used by the anarhiza to connect the entirety of the Switchboard, a modification that saw glass be integrated into conduit, to form the glasswire. This glasswire, via the simplifying, perfecting power of glass, was able to ablate all excess from the lattice of a Netmaster - paring them down to the rawest state of their ontology - and enabling them to become as weft packets, inscribed with the writ of the Interlace Command, and facilitating traversal across the DevitNet.

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The Panopticon

A truly bizarre creation, the Panopticon was formerly a Vault in the Switchboard situated near a gaping jaw to the Vitric Shelf. The vault was krashed and Striders began a litany of experiments with it, due to the nature of one of its defenses; a seemingly infinite labyrinth of cell-like rooms that to many, would prove inescapable. As their experimentation generated massive quantities of information and created a considerable amount of calcic activity, the nearby jaw grew towards it, and aimed to swallow the vault whole. However, it proved unable to do so, resulting in the jaw jammed shut with the structure, but the vault itself now straddling the divide between the Sky and the Vitric Shelf.

Narratively, the Spyndl Academy in conjunction with various other factions seized control over it and now use it as a prison. Through the power of a reprogrammed Vault Mind, they are able to move components - walls, floors, ceilings, entire rooms, collections of them - around individually, allowing them to encase imprisoned convicts in cocoons of Glass. Escape is - theoretically - impossible, as just about any conceivable calcic method employable is subject to the effects of Glass.

And in addition to this structurally, mechanically, flawless prison is a warden to watch over it, maintaining an endless vigil. Being a reprogrammed Vault Mind, the warden Panoptes is bestowed a prime directive of oversight, and is thus able to watch over the entirety of the Panopticon’s structure and inhabitants.

Considering its sheer scale, complexity and use, the Panopticon is classified as a non-planetary super-structure.

Vitric Warfare

Weave and Warfare is recommended reading for this section.

An altercation between a wielder of the Strider and Weave Protocols, and a Grounded (one who lacks such power) would be terribly one-sided. As detailed, the Weave Protocol allows for the manipulation of quite literally the stuff of local reality, and Weave and Warfare outlines extensively just how weaponizable local reality is. Lacking the necessary modification to the interface strait to output chalk, the Grounded thus cannot weave chalk, use higher-level teks, perform rituals or perform the Flash Protocol. While they can use a relic that operates off of its own internal calcic supply, they will only be able to perform the absolute baseline of the functions it has, while being subject to a non-trivial salvo of restrictions and impediments. Even ignoring the school of white, lacking any conviction in the things of the Void means they cannot manipulate curvature, depthstride, requisition boons from the Void, weave spatial barriers or expand hollows.

Performing a fairly cursory examination, one would readily conclude that the Grounded have no true means of opposing those who can utilize either the powers of white or black. The discrepancy in power is simply far too great as to be utterly unbridgeable. However, the Grounded - by not having the Striders’ and Weavers’ strengths - do not have their weaknesses, most foremost of this being a greatly reduced vulnerability to the perfecting influence of Glass.

Striders and Weavers - who possess an immense vulnerability to both - are thus at immense risk of coming up against a weapon that harnesses glass in some way. Even just a lucky strike from a crude dagger is more than enough to dispatch an otherwise phenomenally powerful denizen of the Switchboard. The Grounded - who can even take cuts from glass and survive long enough for their own innate reverse unravelling, even though slower relative to the other families - thus extensively make use of glass in various weapons and weapon systems, as a means to equalize them and wielders of higher powers. The power presented by glass makes it both a powerful offensive and defensive tool, as it abhors and shreds chalkweave with little effort, this meaning it shreds even the techniques used by calcic fighter as they deploy them.

For this reason alone, even those unable to use the more supernatural of powers used by the Third Kin are able to fight on equal footing with them. Coupled with all manners of other enhancements such as G1 teks, Chromegrafts and more, the Esomechanist superclass under Weave and Warfare is born, an esoteric superclass that breaks the mold of all other superclasses, and specializes in drawing powers from elsewhere other than the schools of white and black. While it is very uncommon for an Esomechanist - even empowered with glass weaponry - to measure up to even the shadow of a decent wielder of either white or black, underestimating them is done at one’s own peril, and the arrogance and pride born from superiority of powers has led many to cheap, unfortunate deaths.

The Lancasters in particular are very fond of glass weaponry, and even as they are mostly looked down upon - even actively despised - by members of the other Families, very few Lancasters are ever caught without some glass on their person, and a strike from a perceived inferior is often the least expected of all kinds.

pNarrat: The Teeth of Ryjik

The Teeth of Skydancer Ryjik describe a class of rare, storied, glass-based weaponry that arose with the Eater Skydancer.

History

In the final stages before what would come to be known as the Fourth Offensive and the attack on the Trinary Complex, the Third Kin were forced to confront the reality that was their inability to traverse the Vitric Shelf, the domain of the Trinary Minds that staged the entire offensive against the Third Kin. But the Third Kin’s unmatched resolve and dominion over the affairs of weft and the Astrolabe set about forging a solution; a grand ledgerial cast to skew the Astrolabe’s calculus, and incite into being a means to defeat glass and the Vitric Shelf.

Born with teeth of crystal and a star in his stomach, the Seventh Skydancer, Ryjik the Eater, arose. In his nature was the knowledge and ability to defeat glass, and with him in tow, Spyndl Academy and the Third Kin took the fight to the Vitric Shelf, struck against the Trinary Minds in their grand complex, and secured one of the most decisive victories for the Third Kin, and securing another - perhaps the greatest - foothold into the Era of the Third Kin.

But Ryjik could do more than just ‘defeat’ glass. His ability to defeat glass came from his strange ability to consume it, irrespective of purity, and in doing so, render it inert. This inert glass manifested in the various planets of the Switchboard as a biome written into their planetary equations. This inert glass - this, scintillate as it came to be called - became a fixture of the chromatic biomes that emerged following the rise of Skydancer Ryjik, and glass in this form came to be harnessed by the Third Kin, the mechanics of doing so taught by the Skydancer himself.

Compiled in a tome titled The Writ of the Eater, Skydancer Ryjik outlined the first rules and schematics of what would come to be the glass ritualism; chalk ritualism that used glass as a component, with scintillate acting as a buffer between the complex chalk ritual and the complexity-shredding glass it sought to utilize. He recorded the affects scintillate had on the lattice when consumed; glass would destroy the lattice of all who consumed it, but scintillate behaved differently - almost like a mind-altering ‘drug’ - dependent seemingly on the color of the scintillate.

Link to original

But the most storied bit of knowledge acquired from the inquiry of Ryjik was in the making of weaponry. Before the attack on the Trinary Complex in the Vitric Shelf, Skydancers Onuris, The Hammer, and Ryjik, the Eater, collaborated in shaping a weapon. A weapon that harnessed chalk, glass, their stable crystalline-complex and the scintillate glass-inversion. It was called the PRISMpick, and it had power that spanned the DevitNet and the Dancirah. With it, with a single strike, it could breach and seize control of any network, any computational device, carve a path into any Vault, sunder any weave, and contend even with - admittedly - lesser ritualism. Within it was the power of Skydancer Ryjik; the power to eat, and render impotent.

The PRISMpick was the first of the weapons that would come to be known as the Teeth of Ryjik. With their power and nature known and yet not fully explored, they became incredibly coveted. Forging them is no easy task, as glass is a material that actively opposes being worked upon. As such, so few of them exist that they have attained the status of myth, the PRISMpick itself being lost during the Refrain. This has only cultivated more interest in forging more of them, by any means possible, as those who wield them are believed to be able to defeat any obstacle to their aims, be it chalkweaver or construct.

For now, the only ones suspected to truly have or be able to forge Teeth weaponry are Skydancer Ryjik’s apostolics within the Sil’khan Sabai; nomad-zealots that worship the the Skydancer’s and live to spread their words. Ryjik’s faithful in particular - the Eaters of Ryjik - laud themselves as crusaders against the Vaults in the Switchboard, reenacting the purpose for which Ryjik arose to begin with.

Legacy: Instrument Six

A holdover from an iteration of glass that precedes even the Project Samsara. It will likely face revision or outright deprecation.

A holdover from earlier iterations of glass, the Instrument Six is a specially-designed anti-Strider weapon employed to deal with the Mystics during the height of the Mysticism crisis. Due to the Mystics’ immense power, conventional engagement methods proved ineffective, and so new approaches needed to be taken.

Taking the form of hypodermic syringe or bullet, a measure of prepared glass encased in a calcic ‘artifact’ that directs the payload, the glass can be delivered in a manner that - in an overwhelming number of cases - attacks solely the Strider Protocol while leaving the Strider unharmed otherwise. It proved very effective, and was one of the many prongs on the fork that finally took down the Mystics.

Variants of it were created;

1. I-6As, which only temporarily suppresses the ability to Stride. It is widely used and regarded as an underhanded method to gain an upper-hand in a fight.
2. I-6Ds or ‘sixties’, the actual military grade iteration of it, locking down the ability to Stride to facilitate suppression and capture. However, it’s effects can be undone using various methods. For every ritual there are counter rituals.
3. I-6Rs; ‘rulebreakers’, an iteration designed to attack the Strider Protocol of victims as well as the Mysticism itself. It ultimately led to the downfall of the Mystics.
4. I-6Es; ‘executioners’, issued by justice systems as a punitive measure, and cannot be undone. It irreversibly destroys the Strider Protocol, and makes those inflicted with it, ‘Slow’.

The existence of I-6 drives endless conflict across the Switchboard, as they are the simplest way to defeat a Strider. Despite them being outlawed and open production ceasing after the Mysticism crisis, underground manufacturers and black markets continue their production and distribution. Striders themselves occasionally carry some of it themselves, as a last resort.

pNarrat: ‘Taking the Glass’

It is hardly beyond conception that the Switchboard and the people in it - beautiful as it and they may be - might cause strife to those within in. Pain and suffering have always been inescapable parts of being - perhaps even inherent to the very reality of it - and there are as many means of dealing with this as there are people dealing with it. Some are perhaps uniquely outfitted with the manner and methods to deal with it in ways that wouldn’t be described as ‘destructive’, but those are the lucky ones. For some, a wholesale ablation of this affliction is far more preferable.

Chalk remembers, glass forgets; and with pinpoint, surgical application of glass to the memory strait, it is possible to utterly destroy parts of it. Traumatic events can simply be erased from one’s cognitive records, and the vacuum replaced with other things or left to simply exist as is; a hole that’s inexplicable, rather than debilitating.

It has come to be used extensively by many who’ve been subjected to the rawer edges of the Switchboard, such as those who fought on the numerous battlefronts that mark the verse’s history and built the world that exists today. The Spyndl Academy and its Operators in particular are known for extensive practice and usage of this ‘glass therapy’, as a method of coping with the hard realities they regularly face.

A narrative example of this was during the events of Chrome’s Graveyard, were a very many number of Striders, particularly Sil’khan, suffered immense harm at the hands of psychological weapons employed by the antagonist of the time. Extensive usage of glass therapy was necessary to heal the damage, but it inevitably resulted in many who were unable to articulate what happened to them beyond it being terrible, and much more harm as glass therapy is not without its risks.

Inevitably, it saw usage as both a recreational drug, and a weapon.

As a weapon, it saw extensive use in purging the memory of its victims, either to target certain certain bits of it, or ‘wiping the slate clean’, as it were. Extremely precise usage of glass therapy that makes use of diluted glass and the Vitric ritualism have even been used to write false memories to the vacuum, to utterly deceive a victim and make them believe whatever a bad actor may choose.

As a drug, in diluted form it can be used to lightly deaden the efficacy edges of the Five Straits, giving a fuzz to memories and an airiness to thinking and processing - all of which are temporary due to the subject’s own passive reverse unravelling repairing the damage. While under the effect however, this effect on the psyche induces states of ‘euphoric apathy’ in subjects, where the inability to fully recall and grasp what is being recalled leads to the conclusion that they do not matter, and the things that a subject is inclined to - their happier times - are brought to the fore, the fuzziness of these warmer memories making them appear warmer still. Stronger doses can induce temporary vacuums in immediate memory, and chalkweave can fill these vacuums with ‘false’ memories, giving vivid hallucinations - artfully crafted by practitioners of this very thing - or the opportunity to live through experiences lived by others. This drug - scintillate - is one of the more valued oddities of the verse, though it exists in endless contention by many parties in the Switchboard.

Entropy Reversal

Thanks doctor.

Calcodynamics is recommended reading for this section.

To summarize what is likely a very complex application of various verse mechanics, glass has the ability to convert heat in the Switchboard into motion, via its negentropic properties and thus the ability to reverse entropy. The usefulness of this quirk of its nature is applied most extensively in SB_Technology. If one is so inclined, they can take this fact and run with it, and be no worse for wear.

But of course, there are mechanics behind it.

Killing the atom in the building of the Samsara canon led to many, many headaches down the line. While I am always one for a challenge, worldbuilding has given me a taste for ‘elegance of execution’, insomuch as things not just work, but do so in a manner that can be - to the best of my own ability - grasped fairly easily. Light was one such issue that we had no elegant solution for for the longest time, almost resulting to the integration of ‘atom-less quantum mechanics’ just to facilitate light working. Thankfully we did eventually find a means to work around this that met my criteria for elegance in execution.

Heat and motion in the Switchboard are another such thing. To solve the problem of heat, I formulated inductive weave, which was chalkweave that under conditions, could incite itself on other chalkweave, basically allowing weft to move almost through vacuum from endpoint to endpoint. Its relationship to heat was that objects in motion in the Switchboard, when they slowed down, released ‘heat weave’. Why is this case? What does this? I propositioned the doctor for the answer and what I was given was fairly simple; nothing. Nothing does. It is simply a thing that is. It - like many other things - is merely a first principle of the verse; a bit of rule writ upon which all other things hinge while it itself hinges on nothing. We can define the nuances of this behavior and the conditionals that modify it, but it does not change the fact that it merely one of the many things in the verse that simply are. There is no ‘why’.”

In much the same way, glass is another of those things. Irrespective of the operating principle that best serves to realize glass - be it perfected chalkweave or free from chalk entirely - it simply does what it does, and while we can define all sorts of metrics around the doing, there is no why-ing the doing itself. It’s like asking why, in our own universe, things tend towards equilibrium states. From osmosis in tiny cells to the nuclear atom-forges of stars, things just seem to like to be balanced. And in the Switchboard, things want to be complex. But glass opposes this, and while often this fact is incredibly problematic, in some instances it can be harnessed by the careful and the cunning.

pNarrat: ‘Nullscopes’

You’ve opened a can of worms with this one, doctor.

There is an intersection of the various intricacies of the praximechanics and similar subject matter outlined under The Blank-Slate Mind, and the nature of glass as a negentropic phenomenon. It stems from the fact that at the core of doctrines, convictions and the praximechanics that stems from their being taken to narratively-useful ends, is the concept of Bayesianity - or rather, forming accurate beliefs via reason and observation.

It is that final bit - observation - where glass is introduced in a rather interesting way. When you observe something in the Switchboard, it goes on record that you did - in your ontological ledger that the Astrolabe maintains to properly factor in you as a variable for its calculus. The denizens of the Switchboard - no one really - can see these ledgers however, as they dwell within the Current, outside of their ability to perceive. As such, while I can observe you, I cannot observe your totality, because that is hidden from me by virtue of the mechanics of the verse. To obtain more from you - the contents of your ledger - I am compelled to interact with you, or something that has interacted with you; but I am compelled to interact with something.

Imagine then, that I wasn’t.

What if there was some esoteric means to obtain truth from literally, nothing? What if I could wrench accurate answers to any questions by querying a perfect vacuum and seeing it spit out matter? You could say the powers of Black and the Void facilitate something like this - trawling the depths of the Dancirah’s grave for fallen boons - but that is still very, very far removed from absolute nothing. Glass’ negentropy facilitates something that splits open the very workings of the verse; the ability to obtain information from a ledger without interacting in any way, shape or form with the object of that ledger. I could merely wave a hand with glass in it and obtain the entirety, the totality, of all there is to know of anything of my choosing.

Under the mechanics of knowledge of desired information translating to tangible calcic power, something like this immediately breaks the system. Via glass, one could obtain any desired secret they’d like, and receive immense calcic dividends by writ of praxis, powering them up beyond belief, and all who shared their doctrine by extension. Glass would simply facilitate obtaining answers, as it would allow for forming accurate beliefs about things without needing to undergo the rigor of interacting with them.

But how would it be done?

This is the bits of it all where it gets somewhat muddy, as ‘how it would be done’ is a question that ideally must factor in narrative ambitions and implications. At the crux of this idea however, is the ability to read ledgers and obtain information from those ledgers without ever having had to interact with the object of those ledgers.

• The doctor proposed that merely jamming glass into one’s own straits - the computational strait in particular, as it functions as a ‘bayesian engine’ of sorts - would allow for a total restructuring of its structure and thus functionality, which would facilitate this querying-the-vacuum negentropic power - an explanation that’s weighty on the start and end but scanty in the middle.

• My idea is making use of the vitric ritualism, which benefits from being an already-established extension of an already-established and thoroughly designed mechanic. It also answers the question of ‘how’ you’d know what ledger you aimed to obtain from the vacuum, using some rudimentary form of targeting via the various other components used in the ritual.

• My final idea is something a little further on from those; a device that allows for screening the ledgers in the Current, allowing obtaining information from vacuum. This I - after much deliberation, I assure you - have dubbed the ‘nullscope’. Much like a telescope spots distance land through a vacant expanse, so does the nullscope spot radiant truths from the oppressive vacuum.

The implications of negentropy/entropy reversal used in this way are outrightly verse-breaking, and as such, while it is very easy to add all manners of constraints and conditionals upon the harnessing of such a mechanic, it is even easier to simply declare that it does not exist, or is not used in the canon the way it could be, saving the denizens of the Switchboard from perhaps the sharpest flavor of annihilation ever conceived.

pNarrat: Controlled Substance

Glass is in many ways the plutonium of the Samsara canon, though more dangerous in some ways and less in others. What remains a similarity between them however, is that many parties have a vested interest in minimizing how much of it exists in circulation within a civilizational context. We don’t want bad actors developing dirty bombs, just as denizens of the Switchboard don’t want widespread practice of Vitric ritualism, or glass blades and bullets in every coat pocket. For this reason, glass is a controlled substance, and perhaps the most controlled anything in the Samsara canon.

Consider the source; all glass emerges from the Vitric Shelf, and does so via effusion from the Jaws that dot the Great Sky. In the time of the First Praxis War, the Eradication Imperative were able to cut space and the boundaries between the Dancirah and the Shelf, opening Jaws wherever they pleased, annihilating the Vermeil civilization and leaving entire planets suffering from the scintillating scars that result from the usage of this weaponry. Following that war, they employed similar tactics against the Third Kin the Second Praxis War, though to somewhat limited effect as the Third Kin were far more capable combatants in just about every regard. Following their defeat and the later storming of the Trinary Complex, the means and methods of forming the jaws artificially was lost, and thus, all jaws that still exist are naturally occurring and fleeting, opening and closing from time to time, sometimes disappearing from one place to appear elsewhere.

Their subsequent rarity and impermanence has thus made them fairly easy to monitor, seize control of, and thus restrict access to. In the spirit of mutually-shared good, the fact that glass is so overwhelmingly dangerous to the overwhelming majority of people has thus incentivized cooperation towards restricting the proliferation of glass throughout the Great Sky, accomplished through various bodies all operating under the umbrella of a Vitric Control Coalition.

The functions of the VCC are as such;

• Tracking, Securing and Containment: The number one priority of the VCC - their prime directive - is the tracking and securing of Vitric jaws, and the containment of the glass they release. Be it tiny slivers glue to a blunt club, or an entire planet from the earlier eras, nothing is more paramount than ensuring that all glass that exists is accounted for.

• Extractive and Economic: The VCC are the sole authority in the Switchboard allowed to ‘mine’ glass from the Vitric Shelf, accomplished through the construction of elaborate free-standing space platforms around a suitable jaw, and chipping away at its ‘teeth’; the stalagmite-like projections of pure glass that round the rim of the spatial distortion. Mined glass is then processed, packaged and sold to those with VCC-validated need and uses for it.

• Administrative and Managerial: The VCC is responsible for maintaining a comprehensive database of all glass in circulation in the entire Switchboard, as well as ensuring it is being used only in the functions where it was released for use. The many genuine, tangible, good uses of glass has thus made it such that glass can be requested and allotted to those who request it for meeting these purposes, but VCC administrators and managers are responsible for ensuring this is the sole manner in which glass is used.

• Innovative: Profits generated from their activity are used to further study into glass - both into how it can be used and how its more negative effects can be mitigated. They’ve come to canonically own something akin to patents upon most means of using Glass.

• Medical: Their research into the workings of glass, especially its effects upon the lattice of the Third Kin, has uniquely situated them for addressing all manners of physiological damage done by Glass. The VCC’s own medical complexes are often a last resort for those who’ve been afflicted by glass’ effects.

• Informative: glass is by all metrics a truly fearsome force of nature, and the fear it elicits, when mixed with ignorance, can yield paranoia and poor practices. The VCC fights ignorance and misinformation about glass to ensure those who use it or accidentally come in contact with it know how to handle any situation that might arise.

• Retrieval and Disposal: Occasionally, an instance of Vitric Breach occurs, caused by mishandled glass being given the opportunity to rip through reality, propagating massively and soon escaping control. The VCC are responsible for responding to these situations, containing them, retrieving the glass, rescuing anyone or thing left behind, and indexing as well as disposing of the mass of glass material.

• Investigative: When glass goes unaccounted for, the VCC are tasked with tracking it down. Tracing how measures of it changes hand, investigating the buyers, sellers and mules of the material, finding out the motive of the final holder, and arresting all those involved are all within their scope and authority, all to ensure glass doesn’t make it into the wrong hands.

• Interventive: Occasionally, glass falls into the wrong hands, and those hands aren’t willing to relinquish that glass without a fight. The VCC thus has paramilitary divisions assembled from multiple contributors to pursue armed interventions where and when necessary. Spyndl’s Operators are often seen in the VCC’s ranks.

It is in the best interest of nearly everyone that an organization such as the VCC is given proper rein and resources to function, and a transparency of operation is essential for the task of ensuring glass is securely contained. However, there are always corrupt elements about, and there are those who are far more interested in the unique brand of power that wielding glass confers.

pNarrat: A Leak in the Current

The Astrolabe and The Doctrine of Passing are essential preliminary reading for this section.

Despite this very much not being what glass does, it is still interpreted functionally as such; glass destroys chalkweave. This is a concern in ways stressed upon time and time again in the runtime of this document, but perhaps the final - and the greatest - problem presented by glass is what effect it has on all things Astrolabic. In particular, the concern is born from the fact that glass - or rather, that Jaws that open between the Dancirah and Shelf - seem uniquely capable of interacting with the Calcic Current, and thus, with ledgerial subject matter.

This is, as one would immediately imagine, indescribably disastrous, as it would mean that glass is capable of directly interfacing with not just things, but the records of things, and it is via these records that the Astrolabe performs its calculus. There is a leak in the system now, where the ontological ledgers of the verse are subject to destruction at the hands of a mechanic in that verse.

Ideally, the Current would be a closed, but gradually lengthening loop. glass both shortens this loop, and breaks its continuity entirely. The most immediate concern is what this means for the mechanics behind the death of Third Kin. When a denizen of the Switchboard is in the between-state of un-life and birth, forming - as it were - via either gestation or the Ritual of Conjugation (SB_Physiology and Birthing and Being are recommended reading on this point), they draw from the Current to pull some of the integral material that forms their backbone. Upon death, all the weft that makes up a Third Kin is returned to the Current in a similar manner. Functionally normally, boons are gifted, wielded, and then relinquished to be gifted to the next generation, spread across peoples and the entire Switchboard.

But glass breaks this system. It is unknown how or where it is the jaws act, but there is reason to believe they do, and the result of this is that the boons that travel in the Current - memories and powers and so much more - are tangibly, outrightly destroyed at the hands of glass, regularized down to simply perfect - but horribly useless - weft. Iterated over time, many theorize that each generation of the Switchboard will be weaker than the last; knowing less, being capable of less, daring to do less, a reduction of the complexities of their existence down to a useless, monotone slurry.

An end of the world scenario.

For now, while there is some proof it is occurring, there is little means to measure the extent of this decay, and even less means to prevent it. The jaws operate upon their own logics, and the Vitric Shelf appears to be a permanent fixture of the Switchboard’s ontology. As such, while it remains a problem, perhaps even a deeply worrying one, the sheer lack of quantifiability of danger and qualification of mitigatory methods have convinced many to adopt a sort of apathy to it, the apathy many in the Switchboard have towards the Second Refrain.

Seeing as it is such a poignant subject matter to discuss, it has been given a name to better convey its nature; Vitric Consolidation.

pNarrat: The Vitric Shelf

Occupying the conceptual ‘above’ of the Switchboard, the Vitric Shelf situates itself. Being the origin of all Glass, the birthplace of the Shattered, nigh impassable by Strider and Weaver alike, with the ramifications of its nature almost heretical to Switchboard doctrines, the Shelf is regarded as the final frontier; the only un-walked road left for those who call themselves conquerors of the Sky.

Preamble

All attempted sojourns by Striders and Weavers inevitably end in disaster as the Glass tears irreparably into their lattices and calcic powers and possessions. All that is known about the Shelf is acquired through observations of how it interacts with the Switchboard below, and what has been gleaned from various unmanned expeditions undertaken by machines designed with the knowledge they would not return.

Geography

The Vitric Shelf consists solely of Glass.

The entirety of the Vitric Shelf is familiar. Biomes exist; forest, plains, tall mountains, low valleys, rivers and possibly seas - but it is all made of Glass, meticulously shaped into the natural features it imitates. All greenery is Glass merely mimicking it. Mountains are jagged monoliths of misshapen conical Glass reaching for the heights. In place of water, the finest Glass flows through channels as if liquid. Something of a sun shines down on the expanse of the Shelf, and the Glass takes on rainbow hues, becoming kaleidoscopic and distorting to observe.

Most of the Vitric Shelf is vast plain, interspaced by colossal Glass trees, reaching dozens of meters in the air and forming wide canopies through which light shines through and forms curtains of shifting color. Known simply as the ‘Chromatic Wilds’, they stretch as far as any Strider or machine has been able to explore. Irrespective of how they enter the Shelf, they always emerge in the Wilds, and only last so long until the Glass in the air tears their essential systems to shreds.

The result is that researchers are left to speculate on the geography of the Shelf. Piecing together data gathered from various independent trips into the Shelf, they were able to determine the Shelf has mountainous regions, huge heaps of Glass that stretch too - and perhaps the most contentious bit of speculation on the Shelf - the Shelf’s ceiling. Suspected by many is that the Vitric Shelf has a ceiling, deduced by experiments of firing light rays directly upwards and noticing it scatters, but is also reflected downwards. While it remains an oddity, it doesn’t provide much by way of workable knowledge on the geography, except causing some to amend what they call ‘mountains’ to instead be colossal pillars that support the Shelf’s ceiling.

Accessing the Vitric Shelf is done through the ‘jaws’; rifts or portals in the Switchboard inexplicably existing such that entrance is through one side and exit is through the other - so called as they are always found circumscribed with dagger-like ‘teeth’ of glass, causing the rift to resemble the mouth of a wicked beast. These jaws are considerably rare in the Switchboard, with the known locations being few and heavily guarded. Through these jaws, the Vitric Shelf seemingly ‘feeds’ on the Switchboard, something of note in later sections.